Agile: You get what you wish for!

With Agile adoption, organizations usually get what they wish for. 

But, do they get something meaningful and useful?

Not always. Usually, only to an extent.

Adopting #Agile in a meaningful and useful manner is difficult but definitely achievable. And, it requires the organization to have the right #focus and the #commitment to put in decent amount of effort, over a long period of time.

The right Focus is the starting point!

For example, here is the success criteria many leaders focus on while adopting Agile at the team level:

1. Work must be tracked in Jira (or another tool)
2. All teams must use 2 week Sprints
3. Each team must have a Product Owner and a Scrum Master
4. Teams must conduct Daily Scrum (at least 2-3 days per week)

It often feels like 'Checkbox' Agile - Agile is being adopted to fulfill a compliance requirement or to make some senior leader happy. Team members usually continue to work in silos and most of the decision making it driven by the Scrum Master (aka The Manager).

Some leaders learn to go a little further and focus on process maturity:

1. Teams must adopt User Stories and Story Point estimation
2. Teams must conduct all meetings including Backlog Refinement and Retrospective
3. Team #metrics should show consistency of team performance:

• A decent looking Burnup/Burndown
• Say/Do ratio of 80% or more
• Consistency (and improvement) in velocity

Defintely an improvement over the first case, but it is still a medium maturity behavour at best as the focus is more on the process than the outcomes.

High maturity leaders understand that #process and #practices must subordinate to #outcomes and focus on:

1. #Value driven development and delivery

• Iterative value discovery
• Incremental value creation
• Frequent deployment cycle

2. #Visibility and #predictability of the flow of work

• Visual boards and metrics are set up to facilitate consistency in pace, quality and turnaround time

3. Collaborative and Self-Organizing Team Culture

• Relationship between business people and dev team is collaborative, not transactional
• Team members collaborate for both decision making and execution (rather than working in silos)
• Work environment promotes learning and a sense of achievement, without undue stress

With the right focus on Outcomes, choosing the right practices itself becomes an empirical process. It matters less if we use #Scrum, #Kanban, #SAFe, or a combination of practices from different frameworks.

As I mentioned before, it is difficult but definitely achievable.

And, once you stay on course long enough, it becomes a rewarding and enriching journey!